NEW YORK (AP) -- John Fernandez should not have been playing lacrosse Saturday in the Army-Navy alumni game at Madison Square Garden.

By all rights, the former U.S. Army first lieutenant should be dead. But luck intervened.

"It was just a matter of chance -- pure luck," said Fernandez of Shoreham, Long Island, who was severely wounded in Iraq after a U.S. plane dropped a 500-pound bomb on his Humvee in a case of friendly fire on April 3, 2003. Shrapnel from the explosion shredded his legs.

"I crawled," Fernandez recalled. "I couldn't walk."

More than five years later, the soldier can do more than just walk. He can play lacrosse thanks to prosthetic limbs, as he demonstrated during the Heroes Cup, which preceded the New York Titans professional game Saturday night.

"Change of direction is a little bit more difficult just because I don't have ankles," Fernandez said. "I get around. I'm not necessarily the guy who's going to be taking the ball and driving from behind the cage. I'm out there and playing. Running around, setting picks and scoring goals."

Fernandez speaks impassively when he recounts what happened to him. But his story is extraordinary.

Somehow the bomb, which ripped through his Humvee, spared Fernandez, who was sleeping next to the vehicle on a cot south of Baghdad in Karballa. It did not spare his driver, gunner nor the platoon sergeant nearby in another Humvee.

Seven others were injured.

Afterward, Fernandez, 30, was flown to a naval base in Spain and then to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Doctors delivered a grim prognosis when he arrived. Part of his right leg had to go. They could try to save his left foot, but it might be more trouble than it was worth.